How to read Night Raven
You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.
If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.
...the anesthetic, wearing off...
My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.
This story is a prologue for the four-part Snow Queen story that finished Moore's Night Raven run, but what a great little scene setter it is, all by itself.
Moore starts the story with a quote from Velvet Underground musician John Cale's song "Antarctica Starts Here," a song about a terrifying old silent film star (think Sunset Boulevard). While the reference to Antarctica will make sense in a second, it's interesting to compare Night Raven's arch nemesis Yi Yang to that old silent film star of Sunset Boulevard, who I always thought of as a terrible monster from a monster movie. The idea of age and cruelty and a demented mind are brush strokes Moore is using to paint Yi Yang.
He shows us Yi Yang, the 6,000-year-old Chinese crime lord in her sanctuary, Neither Flag nor Wind in 1965. Inside the house, with its beautiful decorations, kneels a man petrified by the sleeping form of his lover, Yi Yang herself. He is petrified by her immortality and what that has done to her.
It's a powerful description of her evil and nicely sets her up as a force to be reckoned with, even though we haven't seen her do much yet (and the one Night Raven arc that featured Yi Yang before Moore started writing the series didn't really paint her as anyone that interesting -- you can read it here if you want).
As a side note, pointing out how brilliant Moore is when he doesn't even need to be, Neither Flag nor Wind is a reference to an old Zen proverb. Two attendants and a lord are watching a flag flap. One says that it's the wind that is moving. The other replies that it's the flag that is moving. The lord replies that neither flag nor wind are moving, it is the mind that moves. What does that mean? Well, some believe that the actions of objects don't matter, it is the observing of them that makes them matter. For this story, it suggests that Yi's power is not in strength or magic, it is her superior mind.
Meanwhile, Night Raven has journeyed to Antarctica to take his cure. A mysterious, masked noir hero in a trench coat wandering in the snow... I wonder if he bumped into Rorschach? We get a nice drawing of Night Raven from Moore's V for Vendetta collaborator David Lloyd. Night Raven takes the cure in a place where no one can get infected if the cure is really a poison for everyone else like Night Raven was initially told. He can feel it curing him. And while he heals, he uses his detective skills to figure out Yi Yang's motives.
"Why would an immortal woman risk loosing a disease that would destroy perhaps all the life upon the planet save for hers and that of her deadliest enemy? Surely, to one who is assured an infinite future, that would be the bleakest future of all. Hence, Yi Yang was lying about the cure in the bottle having a dreadful plague as a side effect. Probably."
Night Raven clearly has a bit of Batman and characters like that in his DNA. And one of the things that drives me crazy about Batman is how rarely he's shown doing actual detective work and making logical deductions. It's refreshing to read how Night Raven figures out his situation.
So why does Yi Yang make Night Raven immortal, make him feel pain for decades and then give him the cure?
"The only other problem that remained in his deductions was one of motive. Why should Yi Yang take such a risk, simply for the sake of brief and cruel amusement in the midst of an unending lifespan? Why would she risk granting immortality to someone, immortality coupled to a pain that would make he who suffered it hate her more than any other single object in the world? Why would she risk freeing her single deadliest enemy from the prospect of death, and then dangle the means before him by which he could also rid himself of the pain which she had induced? Didn’t she realise?
"Didn't she know what he was going to do to her if this cure succeeded? He would hunt her down, though it took centuries.
"Though she hid from him on the ocean bed he would track her across it to where she cowered.
"Though she locked herself in an impregnable vault for a million years, he would be waiting outside when it opened.
"He would find her. And what he did to her then would make what she had done to him seem almost laughable by comparison.
"Why? Why had she risked loosing such an implaceable and horrifying revenge upon herself?
"Unless she was bored."
I love that! Yi Yang made Night Raven immortal so that the prospect of immortality suddenly has some risk to it, some excitement, some reason.
And so, Moore has made Yi Yang not just a good villain, he's made her an interesting character that we now respect, fear and understand. That's some writing, right there!
In her house, Yi Yang wakes up screaming and kills the boy sitting there, just because.
"Naked and slick with his blood she crouches over him and sniffs at the air like an animal. Something is different. Something is abroad in the world that sets this day apart from two million others that she has woken to. Something dangerous.
"She shudders, and the sensation is almost exquisite."
And with that amazing piece, Moore opens the curtains on his final Night Raven story. But we'll get into that next week. What did you think?
Shameless plug
A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.
Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.
We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.
